On the first day of January 1346, the Consell de Cent instructed its scribe, the notary Ramon Ferrer, to replace the city's ageing book of privileges with a new and more accurate one. The volume that followed is the Green Book of Barcelona, now in the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Barcelona: 402 parchment folios, assembled over the following decades and named, then as now, for the color of its binding.
A Charter Collection Built to Govern With
Barcelona's autonomy rested on documents. The codex opens with the council's commissioning act itself, then divides into a generale of law in force throughout Catalonia and a speciale gathering 182 privileges and related instruments concerning the city, the earliest reaching back to 1025. Because such copies had to carry legal weight, the work fell to a notary rather than a professional scribe.
More Than Fifty Painted Folios in the Orbit of the Bassa Workshop
Borders, historiated vignettes of courts and assemblies presided over by counts and kings, and initials occupied by single figures — an angel, a knight, a king with a falcon, a reader holding a scroll — run through the volume, while red rubrics and red-and-blue pen-flourished initials structure it throughout.
Several hands were at work. Scholars place them in the circle of Ferrer Bassa, though the most accomplished has also been related to the workshop of the Master of the Escrivà. The pen-flourished initials on fols. 170v–194 were supplied in 1370 by the Barcelona illuminator Arnau de la Pena.
Law Made Visible
Painting here served jurisdiction. A city that had to prove its rights repeatedly before the Crown gave those rights a form worth showing. The book outlasted the council that ordered it.
We have 1 facsimile edition of the manuscript "Green Book of Barcelona": Llibre Verd de Barcelona Vol. 1 facsimile edition, published by Editorial Base, 2004
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